To adapt to the ever-evolving mobile ecosystem, enterprises need a holistic mobile strategy that unifies disparate systems and works well now and in future too. Building a holistic enterprise-wide mobility strategy requires you to understand your mobile personas (suppliers, customers, employees and partners) – their needs, goals, behavior patterns, preferred devices and technologies across various business functions such as sales, customer support, marketing, etc. The more information you pack into your mobile personas, easier it’d be for you to incorporate relevant mobile capabilities for each of your target personas. 
Studying mobile personas in detail will help you generate a fantastic user experience attuned with the functional requirements of users and empower them with these mobile-enabled capabilities to optimize performance, boost customer acquisition, retention and delight, and drive business growth.
Why Putting Personas First?
Technology and market forces are the two important factors that drive enterprise mobility. With enterprise mobility focusing on front-user interfacing apps, many brands have switched on from traditional emailing to addressing the end user’s mobility needs with persona-based mobility solutions.
With multiple mobile personas for enterprises to handle, enterprises have a gargantuan task of crafting mobile strategies and applications for different platforms and programming languages. 44% of U.S. enterprises are mainly focused on building mobile applications for native devices (e.g., iOS, Android, Microsoft), and 39% that are focused on mobile Web development.
New Persona-based Mobility
The brave new world of mobile interactions has resulted in new mobile business models that focus on fetching competitive advantage for the organizations. Most mobility use cases focus on:
- Understanding customer behavior from multiple angles
- Delivering enhanced customer experiences
- Boosting employee productivity on the go.
It’s no secret enterprises love data, especially when it’s about its different user profiles in this increasingly mobile world. This persona-based data is actionable and there’s nothing sounder than user-centric mobility decisions. As the enterprise successfully crystallizes the user personas, it becomes easy for them to decouple relevant business contexts and build different mobile use cases. This mobile persona building exercise filters the relevant business functions that match up to the specific personas and discover new entry points to serve all users effectively (with security as an essential element across all functional areas).
The success of any persona-based mobility gyrates around the User Experience (UX). With UX packed into productivity tools such as enterprise apps (for sales, CRM, marketing, etc.) and customer apps, enterprises can deliver enhanced productivity for employees and superior customer experiences (like small price tags, easy-to-use and safe payment systems, etc.) for customers, respectively.
Truly mobile users do not like to see the whole dog ‘n pony show. So, mobile engagement across specific points holds vital significance for brands of all sizes today. Leveraging mobile persona data available and predictive models, enterprises can add personalization and intelligence in apps to deliver a great UX for business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-employee (B2E) apps. Many new B2C apps have rich, built-in personas with apt mobile functions integrated to cater to specific user activities in situational needs. Each app must have a unique UX in accordance with each persona’s interaction expectations and mobile behaviors.
To address the mobility needs of each persona, enterprises need to understand the various user profiles and their relationships and behaviors w.r.t different business processes (like talent management, sales, delivery, etc.) and subsets. There is a huge difference in developing and deploying mobile capabilities for enterprise-based and consumer-based relationships.
Evolving Challenges of Enterprise Mobility
With mobility adoption rising more than ever and enterprises leveraging mobile apps to connect with their users, traditional security architecture is not reliable anymore and IT dreads data leakage and security breaches. More than 50% of enterprises support more than one device type thereby exposing the internal network to a wide array of malicious apps.
The three prime factors that contribute in posing enterprise mobility challenges are:
- Proliferated use of mobile devices and apps
- Rising levels of mobile access & unrestrained data sharing across multiple lines of business
- Highly fragmented mobile device platforms
With all these factors working in full force, most enterprises suffer from the below listed challenges of enterprise mobility:
- Security
- Cost Management
- Legal
- Compliance issues
- Enterprise Applications
To address these evolving mobile challenges, enterprises today needs to look beyond lock-and-wipe capabilities and embrace a holistic enterprise mobility model to secure the enterprise across all devices, databases, applications and network.
Conclusion
Today, many enterprises worldwide are grappling with their existing mobile strategies, marred by unworkable expectations, unclear requirements and erroneous organizational policies. Amidst this new wave of mobile capabilities, these enterprises are struggling to adapt and leverage mobile opportunities. The time is right for them to rethink and restrategize their mobility model using a persona-based approach. It’s critical to recognize the fact that persona-based mobility is not simply an institutional fad.
In fact, it’s a strategic approach to manage mobile environment for different user profiles in your enterprise. Not only, does it change the way your different personas (customer, employees and partners) interact with your brand/offerings, but also helps your enterprise gain competitive edge, enhance business value, productivity and customer satisfaction, while cutting the total cost of ownership. However, these enterprise mobility solutions should be designed focusing more on user experience and core business functions. Wearable technologies will have a significant role to play in the future of Enterprise Mobility as wearable technology and context are inter-linked.
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